Talmudic Corrupter: Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Abraham Joshua Heschel


Personal details
Born    11 January 1907
Warsaw, Poland
Died    23 December 1972 (aged 65)
New York, USA
Nationality    Polish

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (2nd from right) in the Selma Civil Rights March with Martin Luther King, Jr. (4th from right). Heschel later wrote, "When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying."

Abraham Joshua Heschel (January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972) was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century.

Biography

Abraham Joshua Heschel was descended from preeminent European rabbis on both sides of the family.[1] His great-great-grandfather and namesake was Rebbe Avraham Yehoshua Heshel of Apt. His father, Moshe Mordechai Heschel, died of influenza in 1916. His mother Reizel Perlow was also a descendant of Avraham Yehoshua Heshel and other dynasties. He was the youngest of six children. His siblings were Sarah, Dvora Miriam, Esther Sima, Gittel, and Jacob.

After a traditional yeshiva education and studying for Orthodox rabbinical ordination semicha, he pursued his doctorate at the University of Berlin and a liberal rabbinic ordination at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. There he studied under some of the finest Jewish educators of the time: Chanoch Albeck, Ismar Elbogen, Julius Guttmann, and Leo Baeck. Heschel later taught Talmud there. He joined a Yiddish poetry group, Jung Vilna, and in 1933, published a volume of Yiddish poems, Der Shem Hamefoyrosh: Mentsch, dedicated to his father.[2]

In late October 1938, when he was living in a rented room in the home of a Jewish family in Frankfurt, he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Poland. He spent ten months lecturing on Jewish philosophy and Torah at Warsaw's Institute for Jewish Studies.[2] Six weeks before the German invasion of Poland, Heschel left Warsaw for London with the help of Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College, who had been working to obtain visas for Jewish scholars in Europe.[2]

Heschel's sister Esther was killed in a German bombing. His mother was murdered by the Nazis, and two other sisters, Gittel and Devorah, died in Nazi concentration camps. He never returned to Germany, Austria or Poland. He once wrote, "If I should go to Poland or Germany, every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated."[2]

Heschel arrived in New York City in March 1940.[2] He served on the faculty of Hebrew Union College (HUC), the main seminary of Reform Judaism, in Cincinnati for five years. In 1946, he took a position at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), the main seminary of Conservative Judaism, where he served as professor of Jewish ethics and Mysticism until his death in 1972.

Heschel married Sylvia Straus, a concert pianist, on December 10, 1946, in Los Angeles. Their daughter, Susannah Heschel, is a Jewish scholar in her own right.[3]

Ideology

Heschel explicated many facets of Jewish thought including studies on medieval Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, and Hasidism. According to some scholars, he was more interested in spirituality than in critical text study, which was a specialty of many scholars at JTS. He was not given a graduate assistant for many years and was relegated to teach mainly in the education school or Rabbinical school, not in the academic graduate program. Heschel was particularly spurned by his colleague Mordechai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, and many students who attended JTS in the 50s sympathized with Kaplan over Heschel.[4]

Heschel saw the teachings of the Hebrew prophets as a clarion call for social action in the United States and worked for black civil rights and against the Vietnam War [1] Heschel was an activist for civil rights in the United States.

He also specifically criticized what he called "pan-halakhism", or a focus upon religiously-compatible behavior.

Influence outside of Judaism

Heschel is among the few widely read Jewish theologians. His most influential works include Man is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, The Sabbath, and The Prophets. At the Vatican Council II, as representative of American Jews, Heschel persuaded the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate or modify passages in its liturgy that demeaned the Jews, or expected their conversion to Christianity. His theological works argued that religious experience is a fundamentally human impulse, not just a Jewish one, and that no religious community could claim a monopoly on religious truth.[5] (The TALMUD in Action -- CSR)

Published work

The Prophets

This work started out as his Ph.D. thesis in German, which he later expanded and translated into English. Originally published in a two-volume edition, this work studies the books of the Hebrew prophets. It covers their lives and the historical context that their missions were set in, summarizes their work, and discusses their psychological state. In it Heschel forwards what would become a central idea in his theology: that the prophetic (and, ultimately, Jewish) view of God is best understood not as anthropomorphic (that God takes human form) but rather as anthropopathic — that God has human feelings.

The Sabbath

The Sabbath: Its Meaning For Modern Man is a work on the nature and celebration of Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. This work is rooted in the thesis that Judaism is a religion of time, not space, and that the Sabbath symbolizes the sanctification of time.
Man is Not Alone

Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion offers Heschel's views on how people can comprehend God. Judaism views God as being radically different from humans, so Heschel explores the ways that Judaism teaches that a person may have an encounter with the ineffable. A recurring theme in this work is the radical amazement that people feel when experiencing the presence of the Divine. Heschel then goes on to explore the problems of doubts and faith; what Judaism means by teaching that God is one; the essence of humanity and the problem of human needs; the definition of religion in general and of Judaism in particular; and human yearning for spirituality. He offers his views as to Judaism being a pattern for life.
God in Search of Man

God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism is a companion volume to Man is Not Alone. In this book Heschel discusses the nature of religious thought, how thought becomes faith, and how faith creates responses in the believer. He discusses ways that people can seek God's presence, and the radical amazement that we receive in return. He offers a criticism of nature worship; a study of humanity's metaphysical loneliness, and his view that we can consider God to be in search of humanity. The first section concludes with a study of Jews as a chosen people. Section two deals with the idea of revelation, and what it means for one to be a prophet. This section gives us his idea of revelation as an event, as opposed to a process. This relates to Israel's commitment to God. Section three discusses his views of how a Jew should understand the nature of Judaism as a religion. He discusses and rejects the idea that mere faith (without law) alone is enough, but then cautions against rabbis he sees as adding too many restrictions to Jewish law. He discusses the need to correlate ritual observance with spirituality and love, the importance of Kavanah (intention) when performing mitzvot. He engages in a discussion of religious behaviorism — when people strive for external compliance with the law, yet disregard the importance of inner devotion.
Prophetic Inspiration After the Prophets

Heschel wrote a series of articles, originally in Hebrew, on the existence of prophecy in Judaism after the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. These essays were translated into English and published as Prophetic Inspiration After the Prophets: Maimonides and Others by the American Judaica publisher Ktav.

The publisher of this book states, "The standard Jewish view is that prophecy ended with the ancient prophets, somewhere early in the Second Temple era. Heschel demonstrated that this view is not altogether accurate. Belief in the possibility of continued prophetic inspiration, and in its actual occurrence appear throughout much of the medieval period, and even in modern times. Heschel's work on prophetic inspiration in the Middle Ages originally appeared in two long Hebrew articles. In them he concentrated on the idea that prophetic inspiration was possible even in post-Talmudic times, and, indeed, had taken place at various times and in various schools, from the Geonim to Maimonides and beyond."
Torah min HaShamayim

Many consider Heschel's Torah min HaShamayim BeAspaklariya shel HaDorot, (Torah from Heaven in the light of the generations) to be his masterwork. The three volumes of this work are a study of classical rabbinic theology and aggadah, as opposed to halakha (Jewish law.) It explores the views of the rabbis in the Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash about the nature of Torah, the revelation of God to mankind, prophecy, and the ways that Jews have used scriptural exegesis to expand and understand these core Jewish texts. In this work Heschel views the second century sages Rabbis Akiva ben Yosef and Ishmael ben Elisha as paradigms for the two dominant world-views in Jewish theology

Two Hebrew volumes were published during his lifetime by Soncino Press, and the third Hebrew volume was published posthumously by JTS Press in the 1990s. An English translation of all three volumes, with notes, essays and appendices, was translated and edited by Rabbi Gordon Tucker, entitled Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations. In its own right it can be the subject of intense study and analysis, and provides insight into the relationship between God and Man beyond the world of Judaism and for all Monotheism.

Quotations

    "Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum hatred for a minimum reason."
    "All it takes is one person... and another... and another... and another... to start a movement"
    "Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge."
    "A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair."
    " God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance."
    "Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy."
    "Self-respect is the fruit of discipline, the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself."
    "Life without commitment is not worth living."
    "Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible."[6]
    "Remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power. Never forget that you can still do your share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and frustrations and disappointments."
    "When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people."
    "Awareness of symbolic meaning is awareness of a specific idea; kavanah is awareness of an ineffable situation.
    "A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought."
    "Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed."
    "The Almighty has not created the universe that we may have opportunities to satisfy our greed, envy and ambition."
    "The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments."
    "The course of life is unpredictable... no one can write his autobiography in advance."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Joshua_Heschel

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HESCHEL, ABRAHAM JOSHUA  

HESCHEL, ABRAHAM JOSHUA (1907–1972), U.S. scholar and philosopher, descended on his father's side from *Dov Baer (the Maggid) of Mezeritch and *Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apta (Opatow); on his mother's side from *Levi Isaac of Berdichev. After traditional Jewish studies, he obtained rabbinic ordination (semikhah). At the age of 20 he enrolled in the University of Berlin, where he obtained his doctorate, and at the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums, where he also taught Talmud and received a second, liberal rabbinical ordination. In 1937 Martin *Buber appointed him his successor at the central organization for Jewish adult education (Mittelstelle fuer juedische Erwachsenenbildung) and the Juedisches Lehrhaus at Frankfurt on the Main. Deported by the Nazis in October 1938 to Poland, he taught for eight months at the Warsaw Institute of Jewish Studies. He immigrated to England where he established the Institute for Jewish Learning in London. In 1940 he was invited by Julian Morgenstern to teach at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he was associate professor of philosophy and rabbinics for five years. From 1945 he taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) as professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism. In 1946 he married Sylvia Strauss, who gave birth to Susannah Heschel, who followed in the footsteps of her father as a scholar of Judaism. Heschel visited Israel and called for the renewal of the prophetic vision in Zion. He served as professor at JTS until his death, combining his professional activities with extensive social action.

Writings

Heschel wrote books and studies on medieval Jewish philosophy – on Saadiah Gaon, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Maimonides, and Don Isaac Abrabanel – as well as on Hasidism. He became one of the most influential modern philosophers of religion in the United States, where his work is widely recognized in Jewish and Christian circles. Heschel saw the task of the philosopher of religion neither in the construction of a "religion of reason" which draws on non-Jewish sources nor in the analysis of "religious experience." The first substitutes philosophy for religion; the second tends to replace it with the psychology of religion. Heschel's own works attempt to penetrate and illumine the reality underlying religion, the living and dynamic relationship between God and man, through the empathetic understanding of the documents of Israel's tradition and of the experience of the religious Jew. Although he brought to this task the tools of modern philosophy, he pointed out repeatedly that no amount of rational analysis alone can ever exhaust the richness and fullness of this reality. He therefore highlighted the fact that reason itself discloses its own limits and that the ineffable quality of the Divine cannot fully be reduced to any scheme of conceptual categories, because man apprehends more than he can comprehend.

Heschel's lifework can be seen as consisting of two parallel strands: (1) the undertaking to study and interpret the classical sources of Judaism and (2) the endeavor to offer to his contemporaries a theology which results from the application of the insights of the traditional sources to the problems and questions which the modern Jew faces. Thus he started out with a book on prophecy (Die Prophetie, 1936), which presents a phenomenology of prophetic consciousness, and a biography of Maimonides treating the existential confrontation of Aristotelian philosophy with rabbinic Judaism. Studies in the field of Ḥasidism continued this undertaking. He published his first American book under the title The Earth Is the Lord's (1950) on Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In his three-volume Hebrew work, Torah min ha-Shamayim be-Aspaklaryah shel ha-Dorot (1962, 1965; third volume published posthumously in 1990), he presented the assumptions and ideas underlying the talmudic views of Torah and revelation and discovered two major trends in ancient Jewish thought which became formative in all subsequent Jewish history. In these two trends, epitomized by Rabbi *Ishmael and Rabbi *Akiva, halakhic differences reflect different aggadic positions of faith. Rabbi Akiva maintained that the Torah is written in heavenly language, which stimulates vision and opens one up to mystery, whereas Rabbi Ishmael asserted that the Torah is written in the language of man, which promotes logical thinking and the search for peshat (the plain meaning).

The results of Heschel's wide-ranging studies contributed to the formation of his original philosophy of Judaism, expressed in his two foundational books, Man Is Not Alone (1951) and God in Search of Man (1955). Religion is defined as the answer to man's ultimate questions. Since modern man is largely alienated from reality, which informs genuine religion, Heschel tried to recover the significant existential questions to which Judaism offers answers. This leads to a depth-theology which goes below the surface phenomena of modern doubt and rootlessness and results in a humanistic approach to the personal God of the Bible, who is neither a philosophical abstraction nor a psychological projection, but a living reality who takes a passionate interest in His creatures. The "divine concern" or "divine pathos" is the central category of Heschel's philosophy. Man's ability to transcend his egocentric interests and to respond with love and devotion to the divine demand, to His "pathos" or "transitive concern," is the root of Jewish life with its ethics and observances. The ability to rise to the holy dimension of the divine imperative is at the basis of human freedom. The failures and successes of Israel to respond to God's call constitute the drama of Jewish history as seen from the viewpoint of theology. The polarity of law and life, the pattern and the spontaneous, of keva ("permanence") and kavvanah ("devotion"), inform all of life and produce the creative tension in which Judaism is a way of prescribed and regular mitzvot as well as a spontaneous and always novel reaction of each Jew to the divine reality.

Heschel developed a philosophy of time in which a technical society that tends to think in spatial categories is contrasted with the Jewish idea of hallowing time, of which the Sabbath and the holidays are the most outstanding examples (The Sabbath, 1951). He defined Judaism as a religion of time, aiming at the sanctification of time. In his depth-theology, which is based upon the human being's pre-conceptual cognition, Heschel thought that all humanity has an inherentsense of the sacred; he pleaded for a radical amazement and fulminated against symbolism as a reduction of religion. Instead of advocating a sociological view of Judaism, he highlighted the spirituality and inner beauty of Judaism as well as the religious act, while at the same time rejecting a religious behaviorism without inwardness. Heschel's way of writing is poetical and suggestive, sometimes meditative, containing many antitheses and provocative questions and aims at the transformation of modern man into a spiritual being in dialogue with God.
Religion and Action

Underlying all of Heschel's thought is the belief that modern man's estrangement from religion is not merely the result of intellectual perplexity or of the obsoleteness of traditional religion, but rather the failure of modern man to recover the understanding and experience of that dimension of reality in which the divine-human encounter can take place. His philosophy of religion has therefore a twofold aim: to forge the conceptual tools by which one can adequately approach this reality, and to evoke in modern man – by describing traditional piety and the relationship between God and man – the sympathetic appreciation of the holy dimension of life without which no amount of detached analysis can penetrate to the reality which is the root of all art, morality, and faith.

Heschel applied in a number of essays and addresses the insights of his religious philosophy to particular problems confronting people in modern times. He addressed rabbinic and lay audiences on the topics of prayer and symbolism (see his Man's Quest for God, 1954), dealt with the problems of youth and old age at two White House conferences in Washington, and played an active part in the civil rights movement in the U.S. in the 1960s, and in the Jewish-Christian dialogue beginning with the preparations for Vatican Council II. Heschel thought that religious people from various denominations are linked to each other, since "No religion is an island."

Heschel considered himself a survivor, "a brand plucked from the fire, in which my people was burned to death." He also regarded himself as a descendant of the prophets. He was a person who combined inner piety and prophetic activism. He was profoundly interested in spirituality, but an inner spirituality concretely linked to social action, as exemplified by his commitment to the struggle for civil rights in the U.S., by his protests against the Vietnam War, and by his activities on behalf of Soviet Jewry (see i.a. The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence, 1966).

ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY:

J.J. Petuchowski, "Faith as the Leapof Action: The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel," in: Commentary, 25:5 (1958), 390–97; F.A. Rothschild (ed. and intr.), Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism from the Writings of Abraham J. Heschel (1965); S. Seigel, "Abraham Heschel's Contribution to Jewish Scholarship," in Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly, 32 (1968):72–85; F. Sherman, The Promise of Heschel (1970); S. Tanenzapf, "Abraham Heschel and his Critics," in: Judaism, 23:3 (1974), 276–86; M. Friedman, "Divine Need and Human Wonder: The Philosophy of A.J. Heschel," in: Judaism. 25:1 (1976), 65–78; B.L. Sherwin, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1979); S.T. Katz, "Abraham Joshua Heschel and Hasidism," in: Journal of Jewish Studies, 31 (1980), 82–104; H. Kasimow, "Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interreligious Dialogue," in: Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 18 (1981), 423–34; J.C. Merkle, The Genesis of Faith: The Depth-Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel (1985); J.C. Merkle (ed.), Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought (1985); L. Perlman, Abraham Heschel's Idea of Revelation (1989); D. Moore, The Human and the Holy: The Spirituality of A.J. Heschel (1989); H. Kasimow and B. Sherwin (eds.), No Religion Is an Island (1991); E.K. Kaplan, Holiness in Words (1996); E.K. Kaplan and S.H. Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (1998); R. Horwitz, "Abraham Joshua Heschel on Prayer and His Hasidic Sources," in: Modern Judaism, 19:3 (1999), 293–310; E. Schweid, Prophets for Their People and Humanity. Prophecy and Prophets in 20th Century Jewish Thought (Heb., 1999), 234–54; A. Even-Chen, A Voice from the Darkness: Abraham Joshua Heschel – Phenomenology and Mysticism (Heb., 1999); E. Meir, "David Hartman on the Attitudes of Soloveitchik and Heschel towards Christianity," in: J.W. Malino (ed.), Judaism and Modernity: The Religious Philosophy of David Hartman (2001), 253–65; idem, "Love and Truth in the Jewish Consciousness According to Abraham Joshua Heschel," in: Hagut. Jewish Educational Thought, 3–4 (2002), 141–50; G. Rabinovitch (ed.), Abraham J. Heschel: Un tsaddiq dans la cité (2004).

[Fritz A. Rothschild /Ephraim Meir (2nd ed.)]

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